Field
This invention relates generally to media, and more specifically, to a method to generate a video dynamically for a viewer.
Related Art
Watching video over the Internet is becoming a major trend. Internet video portals such as Netflix™, Hulu™, Amazon Instant Video™, YouTube™ and many others allow a viewer to select and watch a video. A viewer specifies keywords. Some portals ask for approximate time duration and a submission time of the video. The portals match the criteria to their video libraries and select matching videos. When two viewers watch the same video selected by a portal, they will see the same video signals and data, despite one viewer having a different preference than another viewer. For example, two viewers watch the movie “Avengers”, where super-heroes battle against super-villains. One viewer is from Asia and would enjoy the movie more if the battle scenes show her favorite buildings and cities being destroyed by the villains or saved by the heroes. The other viewer is in his 50's and would enjoy the movie better if some of the scenes related to the 1970's, for example, by playing background music by the Bee Gees when the super-heroes meet to discuss a plan to fight the villains.
Studios and producers often are aware of the targeted audience. The scenes and acts are carefully scripted for different audiences, viewer demographics, countries, and cultures, among other considerations. Many acts and scenes are filmed and edited into multiple video clip editions according to the viewer-targeted scripts. The video clips are then combined into different releases targeted for different markets. Each release is a complete edition and is considered a video. In the above example, the producer may release an Asian-targeted edition of “Avengers” and a 1970-targeted edition of “Avengers”. When a viewer is a 50-something Asian, the viewer cannot watch a hybrid edition between the Asian edition and the 1970-edition, despite the studio having the necessary video clips to produce the desired hybrid edition for the 50-something Asian patron.
In another scenario, a sports video crew is televising a live World Cup soccer match. Many cameras are set up to capture the match in many angles. In the production studio, a director watches multiple screens and decides when and which camera's output is to be televised. The decision is often based on her knowledge about the targeted audience in a market. When the match is televised to multiple markets and countries, many directors are involved to decide when and which camera's output is used for which market. For example, the match is between Germany and Brazil. The Brazilian version shows many angles of the Brazilian team, and the Germany version shows more of the German players. If a German visits Rio and watches the game, he would see the Brazilian version and not the German version. It would be a good experience if the visiting German can see a bit more of the German players and at the same time can share the Brazilian plays with his Brazilian friends. The German viewer would have liked to see a hybrid version of the televised event. Again, despite the crew having set up the cameras to capture all the video signals, the German viewer is not satisfied.
In another scenario, a video portal inserts advertisements to a television show video. The television show was released a day earlier on a broadcast channel and is 23 minutes in length. The video portal decides on a schedule of showing the video with advertisements in a 30-minute schedule. When the video is shown during evening prime time, the video portal is able to attract more advertisers and would like to have a total of 10 minutes of advertisement. When the video is shown during late night hours, the video portal is not able to attract premium advertisers and would like to set it to 5 minutes of advertisement. In order to do so, the video portal needs a 20-minute long version of the video for the prime time evening, and a 25-minute long version of the video for midnight hours. In this scenario, the video portal is not able to provide the flexibility for advertisement due to the constraints of the television show video length.
The above scenarios illustrate the need to generate a video on demand using a plurality of video clips.